Orange chooses Harmonic for IPTV and OTT services

Upgrades its IPTV and OTT video delivery architecture with a Harmonic live encoding and transcoding platform

Harmonic, a provider of video delivery technology and services, has announced that Orange has upgraded its IPTV and OTT video delivery architecture with a Harmonic live encoding and transcoding platform.

At the heart of the workflow is Harmonic’s Electra software-based system, which offers Orange a unified solution for both IPTV and OTT delivery to approximately 6.6 million subscribers in France, streamlining operations and providing the operator with the flexibility to reuse system capacity as its needs evolve over time. Using Harmonic’s video delivery solution, Orange is able to provide its subscribers a wide channel offering, including 160 SD and 30 HD channels for OTT and 126 SD and 40 HD channels for IPTV.

Pay-TV operators will generate $7 billion from distributing live, linear OTT services in mature markets by 2021, according to ABI Research, compared with just over $1 billion today. Using Harmonic’s Electra convergent workflows, Orange can grow its OTT revenues while still powering its traditional IPTV business. By supporting next generation codecs like HEVC and offering clustering capabilities, Harmonic’s solutions will also enable Orange to deliver higher video resolution in the future, up to UHD HDR, at low bit rates.

“Harmonic’s OTT innovation is unmatched with recent achievements in bandwidth optimisation, improved video quality and low latency across all delivery platforms,” said Ian Graham, vice president of sales, EMEA and LATAM at Harmonic. Adopting Harmonic’s all-software media processing portfolio helps customers like Orange stay on top of video format and codec evolutions and launch new services with a quick time to market.”

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